‘Ship’ping it in real time

Fol­low­ing on a sim­i­lar line like Uber, by keep­ing a con­stant eye on driv­ers, to field force and trucks in the lo­gis­tics in­dus­try, So­ham Chok­shi, CEO, Shipsy, shares ways to im­prove ser­vice lev­els and op­ti­mise costs us­ing real-time data.

Ear­lier users used to be happy with a broad com­mit­ment from the lo­gis­tics com­pany—that they would get the par­cel at any time in the next three to six days. But now they ex­pect vis­i­bil­ity from ex­actly where the par­cel was last seen at to re-route the par­cel at the last minute. Go­ing on to the specifics, the big­gest difficulty with lo­gis­tics in In­dia is that of re­li­a­bil­ity. How can a lo­gis­tics com­pany give a de­liv­ery or pickup com­mit­ment, and live up to that prom­ise? How can tech­nol­ogy help here? Shipsy’s vi­sion in­volves an­swer­ing these ques­tions for the lo­gis­tics in­dus­try.

Big Data is grad­u­ally tak­ing place in coun­try’s lo­gis­tics sec­tor. How is Shipsy con­tribut­ing for the same?

Get­ting an­a­lyt­ics in terms of end of day re­ports or in his­toric form helps, but it al­lows ground re­sources to get away with in­ef­fi­cien­cies through the day. The sys­tem should alert op­er­a­tions man­agers when some­thing is go­ing wrong, rather than keep call­ing and fol­low­ing up with the workforce. This is a big data prob­lem.

It in­volves in­te­grat­ing data across ERP sys­tem, mo­bile workforce apps, GPS mod­ules, tem­per­a­ture sen­sors and more. Shipsy fuses all this data and en­ables bet­ter real time de­ci­sion making for op­er­a­tions man­agers with a dash­board that can en­ables ‘Guided Op­er­a­tions’.

Through a set of KPIs and thresh­olds, the sys­tem alerts op­er­a­tions man­agers when some­thing is go­ing wrong. Users can de­fine IFTTT (If This Then That) type alerts, for in­stance; truck idle time greater than par­tic­u­lar value, ex­pected time of ar­rival de­layed by more than X hours, pickup time ex­ceeded by cer­tain num­ber, more than n up­dates from same lo­ca­tion, truck de­vi­ates more than X km from ideal path, X parcels scanned and Y par­cel is miss­ing, etc. These and more can be de­fined in real time by users and they can de­cide how they want to be no­ti­fied; through dash­board, mo­bile, email and more.

What is your strat­egy to stand against your com­peti­tors?

Shipsy’s strat­egy has al­ways been to cre­ate bar­ri­ers to en­try us­ing the lat­est cut­ting edge tech­nol­ogy and de­ploy­ing it in a cost-ef­fec­tive man­ner. Spe­cific to the an­a­lyt­ics in­dus­try we are in, there are sev­eral com­pa­nies, mainly in­ter­na­tion­ally, that have a good suite of an­a­lyt­ics prod­ucts.

Our dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing fac­tors are:

Y Un­der­stand­ing of the op­er­a­tions land­scape in In­dia and the KPIs that would need to be mon­i­tored to en­sure busi­ness level out­comes Y Ex­pe­ri­ence with han­dling all the ERP sys­tems and other data collec­tion sources that would have to be in­te­grated to en­able this anal­y­sis Y Tech­nol­ogy ex­per­tise in data fu­sion and real time an­a­lyt­ics us­ing pow­er­ful open source en­gines such as Apache Spark, Kafka, Hive, Presto and more that helps de­ploy rel­e­vant tech­nol­ogy in a cost-ef­fec­tive man­ner

We have also ap­plied for mul­ti­ple patents to en­sure that we cre­ate suf­fi­cient bar­ri­ers to en­try.

What are your fu­ture plans?

The sup­ply chain in­dus­try is ex­tremely vast and is com­posed of mul­ti­ple play­ers across dif­fer­ent op­er­a­tional land­scapes. There is a lot of buzz around big data an­a­lyt­ics, pre­dic­tive and pre­scrip­tive an­a­lyt­ics and some other terms. While in­dus­try mem­bers broadly un­der­stand the busi­ness level ben­e­fits that could be de­rived from these, they face three ma­jor prob­lems.

Y What do all these buzz words mean for them? How can they be rel­e­vant for their spe­cific busi­ness so that they can help save costs or in­crease rev­enues?

Y How can they de­ploy these prod­ucts such that they in­te­grate closely with their op­er­a­tional pro­cesses? Y How can these prod­ucts be set up in an ag­ile man­ner so that they are flex­i­ble, al­low cus­tomi­sa­tions and en­tail a small up­front cost? Our idea is to scan through the sup­ply chain land­scape and help en­ter­prises across dif­fer­ent ver­ti­cals and solve the above-men­tioned prob­lems.